I am now, at seventy, allowed to lay back. To sustain our wellbeing, to maintain our integrated wholeness, psychotherapy promotes the diversity and richness of a wide variety of life experiences and behaviours. We can thereby become truly street wise, and emancipated from a longing for life lived under the watchful eye that regulates and commands social conditions. The texts presented here are a collection of the insights I have harvested from forty-five years of a fulfilling professional life."These essays, sometimes painfully honest, extend however beyond the realms of psychotherapy and address some of the perennial conundrums of the human condition and our faltering efforts to liberate and make space for the better angels of our nature. At a time when the burdens and tides of our collective and individual histories seem once again all too ready to upend the larger boat in which we all sail, these essays make for timely reading." Ron Roberts, in his Foreword